Since the Second Vatican Council we’ve become so used to singing the Responsorial Psalm that we could miss the fact that what we’re singing today is not a psalm. It’s a canticle—a song—taken from the book of Daniel (Dn 3:52-90). The Canticle of the Three Young Men is rarely sung in full because of its length, but the four verses for today’s responsorial praise the God of Israel extravagantly.

Who were the three young men of the Canticle? They were Jews, friends of Daniel. Their Hebrew names were Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, but we know them as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, names forced upon them by their Babylonian captors. When King Nebuchadnezzar demanded that everyone to worship a huge golden statue, the three young men politely refused—and were thrown into a blazing furnace so hot that it destroyed those standing around it. But the three young men wandered around, singing hymns to God and blessing the Lord. The king’s men kept stoking the furnace (“with naptha, pitch, tow, and brush”!), but God’s angel made the furnace “as though a dew-laden wind were whistling through it.” Stunned, the king freed them and made the astonishing decree that anyone who blasphemed their god would be destroyed.

But that was long ago, right? Such barbarity doesn’t happen anymore, right?

Not unless you count the Holocaust, when six million Jews were herded into camps and killed. The crematoria spewed smoke and sparks day and night.

Not unless you count the horrors of Rwanda, when the Hutu population slaughtered more than half a million Tutsis in less than 100 days.

Not unless you count the nearly 300 Nigerian girls captured from their school by the Islamist extremists Boko Haram, who boasted that they would be enslaved or forced into marriage, or killed.

Any time we divide the world into “us” and “them,” we prepare the ground for such horrors.

Sometimes all we can do is keep singing our just God’s praise.